Relative clauses are considered strong islands for extraction across languages. Swedish comprises a well-known exception, allegedly allowing extraction from relative clauses (RCE), raising the possibility that island constraints may be subject to “deep variation” between languages. One alternative is that such exceptions are only illusory and represent “surface variation” attributable to independently motivated syntactic properties. Yet, to date, no surface account has proven tenable for Swedish RCEs. The present study uses eyetracking while reading to test whether the apparent acceptability of Swedish RCEs has any processing correlates at the point of filler integration compared to uncontroversial strong island violations. Experiment 1 tests RCE against licit that-clause extraction (TCE), illicit extraction from a non-restrictive relative clause (NRCE), and an intransitive control. For this, RCE was found to pattern similarly to TCE at the point of integration in early measures, but between TCE and NRCE in total durations. Experiment 2 uses RCE and extraction from a subject NP island (SRCE) to test the hypothesis that only non-islands will show effects of implausible filler-verb dependencies. RCE showed sensitivity to the plausibility manipulation across measures at the first potential point of filler integration, whereas such effects were limited to late measures for SRCE. In addition, structural facilitation was seen across measures for RCE relative to SRCE. We propose that our results are compatible with RCEs being licit weak island extractions in Swedish, and that the overall picture speaks in favor of a surface rather than a deep variation approach to the lack of island effects in Swedish RCEs.
This paper presents the results from two studies on anaphoric reference to quantifying expressions (QEs) in Swedish, contributing to the current cross-linguistic discussion on this issue. For English it has been shown that the polarity of the QE (positive vs negative) determines the anaphoric set reference (to the referens set, REFSET, or to the complement set, COMPSET), while for Spanish it has been claimed that while REFSET interpretation is the default, the relative sizes of the two sets (REFSET and COMPSET) also matters. In Experiment 1, a semantic plausibility study. The results showed that for positive QEs, anaphoric reference can only be to the REFSET, while for negative QEs, it can only be to the COMPSET. Unlike in English and Spanish, REFSET continuations were categorically ruled out for negative QEs. To investigate whether the internal differences between QEs could be explained in terms of set size, we conducted Experiment 2, an estimation task. The results from this experiment showed that the size of the REFSET relative to the COMPSET was not a determining factor.
This short communication is concerned with long object shift of reflexives in Swedish. Only 3rd person reflexives can shift across their antecedent. For some reason this is possible even if the antecedent is 1st or 2nd person as well, but certain requirements on the antecedent are necessary. This paper shows that neither a purely syntactic nor a purely semantic analysis can account for all the facts. Instead the best analysis seems to be one that makes use of Bonet's (1995) post-syntactic morphological processes: feature delinking, feature erasure and feature insertion.
Binding theory and its principles A, B, and C played an enormously important part in the development of G&B-theory. The abandonment of indices (the inclusiveness condition), and of the syntactic relation government, two core concepts in the definitions of the binding principles (BP), left the BPs with no theoretical significance in the MP (Chomsky, 1995). Only a few attempts have been made to reconcile the descriptive adequacy of the BPs with the MP. These analyses are based either on movement (Kayne, 2002;Zwart, 2002), or on the structure of reflexives, and a reformulation of violations of BPs as cross-over phenomena Wiltschko, 2002a,b, 2004). However, these approaches have significant drawbacks when other areas of syntax are concerned, for instance, restrictions on movement, and c-selection. Moreover, they fail to provide any insights into the question why R-expressions, pronouns and anaphors show the behaviour they do. This paper attempts to solve the binding problem by breaking it down into two parts: one, the nature of probes, and two, the structure of pronouns and reflexives. The proposed analysis does not suffer from the above mentioned drawbacks.Concerning the first part, Chomsky (2001, 2004) analyzes agreement phenomena in the verbal-argument domain as a relation between a probe and a goal. We will show, however, that the stipulation that only v and T are probes is misguided. Based on Bare Phrase Structure (BPS) (Chomsky, 1995) we show that the consequence of the way phrase structure is built is that every item with uninterpretable features is a probe. When DP is merged to V or v in (1) the syntactic derivation treats both V/vP and DP, or D, as heads and possible probes.(1) vPThe fact that D is a phrase in (1) is not determined until after merge with vP. Since v projects D must, by definition, be a phrase (Chomsky, 2004). Since D lacks value for its case feature it is a probe when it is merged with vP. We argue that probing is an effect of, on the one hand the computational system's desire to get rid of uninterpretable features, and on the other hand the fact that external merge is the operation that makes the deletion possible. Consequently, probing is an effect of external merge. We show that this analysis has no unwanted results, and that a theory without the stipulation that only heads are probes gives as good empirical coverage as the previous theory. Hence, the proposed analysis is more minimal.Concerning the second part, the structure of pronouns and reflexives, we show, with data from e.g. relative clause formation and word formation processes, that pronouns are roots, just like any other lexical category (Halle and Marantz, 1993; Josefsson, 1998, among others).We assume that the difference between reflexives and pronouns is not a structural difference but a difference in feature values on D. Support for this assumption comes from the distributional pattern of reflexives, i.e. without an antecedent, they cannot function as arguments (cf. Longobardi, 1994), and they are not referential (cf. Sto...
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